homeschool heartache

He loves to tease me about my history as a geeky home-schooler and it gets worse when I talk about knitting sweaters for fictional literary characters, or admit that I had a wicked crush on Jimmy Stewart as a teen and not Brad Pitt, or argue that the Civil War had precious little to do with slavery. His life with me has been one very long slap of home-school. What can I say – I’m his first home-school experience, I want him to get his money’s worth.

I have little home-school moments when I feel like no one understands me and I revert to a Jane Eyre-esque state of stoic hysteria.

“Do you think that because I was home-schooled I have no heart? No sense of fashion? A slanted education? No interest in the world around me? No understanding of popular culture? No dreams, no needs, no desires?”

Then sometimes, it’s more like this:

I am a Home-schooler. Hath not a home-schooler eyes? Hath not a home-schooler hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winterand summer, as a public schooler is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Ifyou tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?

I’m talking sackcloth and ashes home-school heartbreak.

Then I get over it and move on to the next sweater, the next fond memory of my dead-man crushes, the next argument about states’ rights and how I think pot should be legalized.

Ok, that last gem was more of a Hippie thing than a Home-school thing.

you think pot should be legalized?… oh dear, my girl, you really should move to my neck of the woods. living in plainfield, i am, nightly, lullabied to sleep by the soft “puff puff” of my neighbors and the artistry of pot smoke seeping underneath my door. maybe that’s what i have the munchies so incurably! 🙂

Whenever I get the ‘society does not get me’ symptoms I just get online and rant to my vast collection of homeschooled friends. We laugh at what society is missing out on and feel very satisfied together. 😉